The latest version of Solaris can be downloaded from Softpedia

May 1, 2014 09:55 GMT  ·  By

Oracle Solaris, one of the most widely deployed UNIX operating systems that delivers critical cloud infrastructure with built-in virtualization, simplified software lifecycle management, cloud scale data management, and advanced protection for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, is now at version 11.2 Beta.

Like all the previous versions before it, the new Oracle Solaris 11.2 Beta comes with hundreds of new features and changes. When the final version is made available, the customers will be able to upgrade from the previous build.

“Oracle Solaris 11.2 is a result of Oracle’s continuing investment in systems. With this release, we’ve made it more than an OS. Oracle Solaris 11.2 allows customers to build simple, efficient, compliant and secure clouds which are also open and affordable.”

The Solaris releases are pretty rare, but Oracle works hard to provide some very interesting features in the versions that are made available. For example, centralized cloud management is now available with Oracle's OpenStack distribution. Users will be able to set up an enterprise-ready private cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment in just a few minutes, which is actually a great improvement.

Unified Archives now provide secure Agile application provisioning in the cloud. This type of new archive format enables developers and administrators to quickly clone or create a complete backup, which can be easily deployed as a complete bare metal system.

“Oracle Solaris Zones have been enhanced to include support for fully independent and isolated environments, called Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones, providing a full kernel and user environment within a zone. Kernel Zones increase operational flexibility and are ideal for multi-tenant environments where maintenance windows are significantly harder to schedule,” notes the official announcement.

Also, Elastic Virtual Switch (EVS) has been implemented and allows users to manage multiple virtual switches that are spread across several physical machines most typical in a cloud environment. According to the developers, EVS helps simplify the administration by managing these virtual switches as a single virtual switch, including the management of network traffic between VMs, MAC and IP addresses, VLANs and VXLANs.

A comprehensive list of changes, features, and updates can be found in the official announcement. You can download Oracle Solaris 11.2 Beta right now from Softpedia, but you will also have to create an account with Oracle in order to get the download links.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.